As a Turkish citizen/resident on the south coast of Turkey, I see nothing of the Syrian refugees who are living in the camps along the Syrian border (Report, 5 September). Turkey does not allow them to spread out over the country so that if and when the crisis ends, it can help them return to their own country. They are adequately fed, provided with makeshift shelter and schools. Sunni and Alevi refugees have been resented when placed in communities of the opposite persuasion, and now people, for the first time in Turkey, are segregated on religious lines. This is a potential disaster in itself.

Volunteers share food and drinks with refugees who wait in front of the Berlin Office for Health and Social Affairs (#LaGeSo).
Photo from Tim Lüddemann on 13 August 2015 on Flickr. Non-commercial use with credit to owner permitted.

At their meeting in Prague on Friday the heads of government of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia once again rejected a quota system for taking in refugees. This stance is entirely understandable from an economic perspective, some commentators write. Others warn that the European states must finally admit that they too played a part in causing the migrant crisis.

It’s the photo you couldn’t not see if you were online this week: the body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who was laid to rest with his brother and mother on Friday. His body was discovered washed up on a Turkish beach in sneakers, blue shorts and a red shirt on Wednesday after the small rubber boat he and his family were travelling in — a desperate attempt to seek asylum in Europe — capsized.

The Australian government has hit back after an editorial in the New York Timesslammed Australia’s handing of the influx of migrants and refugees traveling to its shores and advised Europe not to follow suit

BERLIN—The scenes of desperate refugees camping out in Budapest in the hope of catching a train to Bavaria are the rerun of an old film. In September 1989, communist Hungary’s reformist government opened the border to Austria, allowing tens of thousands of East Germans to slip through the Iron Curtain to a better life in the West. By November, the ramshackle regime in East Berlin was facing such an exodus of its citizens via third countries that it caved in to the pressure and opened the borders to West Germany.

LONDON—Picking apart the layers of irony and hypocrisy that surround the European refugee crisis is like peeling an onion without a knife. At a train station in southern Moravia, Czech Republic, police pulled 200 refugees off a train and marked numbers on their arms. On its eastern border, Hungary is building a barbed-wire fence to keep out refugees, remarkably like the barbed-wire “iron curtain” that once marked its western border. Choose whatever image you want—ships full of Jews being sent back to Nazi Europe, refugees furtively negotiating with smugglers at a bar in Casablanca—and it now has a modern twist.

Visiting Brussels on Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the refugee crisis as a German and not a European problem. In Budapest, meanwhile, the situation at Keleti train station is escalating. The German government prompted refugees to storm trains by announcing its willingness to take them in, some commentators write. Others believe that with his egoistic policies Orbán will soon isolate himself in the EU.

Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, sharply criticised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Thursday (3 September) for saying refugees should not come to Europe, and that Muslims are not welcome in Hungary.

First Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans said what everyone suspected on Friday (4 September): that the refugee crisis overwhelming the EU will last a long time, and that “every single European” will feel its consequences.

Amnesty pleads with Harper to rescue Syrian refugeesNational Observer
… a half refugees from the Iraq War, and the WikiLeaksdisclosure of documents inside the Syrian government in that era show their discussion [of] ‘we can’t deal with this’,” said Gore in a speech he made on July 9 at Toronto’s Climate Summit of the …